John Reeve (actor)

His early career was based on mimicry: he became a popular favourite, able to continue in highly paid work, despite drinking heavily and not learning his parts.

He repeated "Sylvester Daggerwood" on 8 and 9 June 1819 at Drury Lane, in benefits for Thomas Rodwell and Gesualdo Lanza; and then played it for a few nights at the Haymarket Theatre.

Reeve appeared there as Squire Rattlepate in William Thomas Moncrieff's burletta, The Green Dragon, or I've quite forgot, and Lord Grizzle in a burlesque of Tom Thumb.

[1] Feeling inexperienced, Reeve then joined William Macready the elder's company in Bristol, and for once took on comic Shakespearean characters.

On 17 April 1826, with a salary of £13 a week, he made as Ralph, a comic servant, in Prince Hoare's Lock and Key, what was inaccurately announced as his first appearance at the Haymarket.

[1] Returning, at a salary of £40 a week to the Adelphi Theatre, now under the management of Frederick Henry Yates, Reeve appeared in a piece entitled Novelty, a framework for his American adventures.

During 1836 he was to have played at the Surrey the main part in The Skeleton Witness, but at the final rehearsal he knew none of his words, and that night he sent a note of apology.

He was on winking terms with his audience, in a way not seen since George Frederick Cooke: the managers John Baldwin Buckstone and Richard Brinsley Peake fed him with short sentences, bywords, and opportunities for business, instead of speeches, which he would not learn.

By his first wife, a Miss Aylett, daughter of an upholsterer in Finsbury, and a dancer in Macready's company, whom he married at Bristol in 1820, he left a son John, a burlesque actor; she died at his birth in 1822 at Swansea.